5.
They go on to state that, when the mother Achamoth had passed through all sorts of passion, and had with difficulty escaped from them, she turned herself to supplicate the light which had forsaken her, that is, Christ. He, however, having returned to the Pleroma, and being probably unwilling again to descend from it, sent forth to her the Paraclete, that is, the Saviour. 1 This being was endowed with all power by the Father, who placed everything under his authority, the Aeons 2 doing so likewise, so that "by him were all things, visible and invisible, created, thrones, divinities, dominions." 3 He then was sent to her along with his contemporary angels. And they related that Achamoth, filled with reverence, at first veiled herself through modesty, but that by and by, when she had looked upon him with all his endowments, and had acquired strength from his appearance, she ran forward to meet him. He then imparted to her form as respected intelligence, and brought healing to her passions, separating them from her, but not so as to drive them out of thought altogether. For it was not possible that they should be annihilated as in the former case, 4 because they had already taken root and acquired strength [so as to possess an indestructible existence]. All that he could do was to separate them and set them apart, and then commingle and condense them, so as to transmute them from incorporeal passion into unorganized matter. 5 He then by this process conferred upon them a fitness and a nature to become concretions and corporeal structures, in order that two substances should be formed,--the one evil, resulting from the passions, and the other subject indeed to suffering, but originating from her conversion. And on this account (i.e., on account of this hypostatizing of ideal matter) they say that the Saviour virtually 6 created the world. But when Achamoth was freed from her passion, she gazed with rapture on the dazzling vision of the angels that were with him; and in her ecstasy, conceiving by them, they tell us that she brought forth new beings, partly after her own image, and partly a spiritual progeny after the image of the Saviour's attendants.
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"Jesus, or Soter, was also called the Paraclete in the sense of Advocate, or one acting as the representative of others."--Harvey. ↩
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Both the Father and the other Aeons constituting Soter an impersonation of the entire Pleroma. ↩
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Col. i. 16. ↩
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That is, as in the case of her mother Sophia, who is sometimes called "the Sophia above," Achamoth being "the Sophia below," or "the second Sophia." ↩
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Thus Harvey renders asomaton hulen: so Baur, Chr. Gnos., as quoted by Stieren. Billius proposes to read ensomaton, corporeal. ↩
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Though not actually, for that was the work of the Demiurge. See next chapter. ↩
